Quotes About Cognition

My experience is that I can think while strolling but cannot engage in mental work that imposes a heavy load on short-term memory.

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

Intuitive predictions need to be corrected because they are not regressive and therefore are biased.

controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs.

Fast thinking includes both variants of intuitive thought—the expert and the heuristic

impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions

The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.

Evaluation on the GOOD–BAD dimension is an automatic operation of System 1

One of the main functions of System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts and actions "suggested" by System 1

our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with "mere statistics.

Judgment is not a synonym for thinking, and making accurate judgments is not a synonym for having good judgment.

Even statisticians were not good intuitive statisticians.

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed. Memory

message, unless it is immediately rejected as a lie, will have the same effect on the associative system regardless of its reliability.

learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The

To think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past.

On the other hand, a good mood makes us more likely to accept our first impressions as true without challenging them.

As I described earlier, System 1 is not prone to doubt. It suppresses ambiguity and spontaneously constructs stories that are as coherent as possible. Unless the message is immediately negated, the associations that it evokes will spread as if the message were true. System 2 is capable of doubt, because it can maintain incompatible possibilities at the same time.

During a mental multiplication, the pupil normally dilated to a large size within a few seconds and stayed large as long as the individual kept working on the problem; it contracted immediately when she found a solution or gave up.

Judgment can therefore be described as measurement in which the instrument is a human mind.

Much like the electricity meter outside your house or apartment, the pupils offer an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used. The analogy goes deep. Your use of electricity depends on what you choose to do, whether to light a room or toast a piece of bread. When you turn on a bulb or a toaster, it draws the energy it needs but no more. Similarly, we decide what to do, but we have limited control over the effort of doing it.

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The word comes from the same root as eureka.

people who make judgments behave as if a true value exists, regardless of whether it does.